How do you get people to read your blog? I just started almost two months ago and I'm in need of some advice to drive traffic to my site! Any ideas? <3?

I have been commenting on blogs, but just doing that doesn’t give me the results I want. I currently have about 2000 unique hits for this month. My goal is to hit 6000 per month in the next 30 days. Please let me know your thoughts!

9 Answers

There are a couple of cheap ways and the tools are already there; you could Tweet about it. Then there is MySpace and FaceBook you can tell your contact about it or post dealing about it on your wall. You can screen the blog address on a T-shirt and have cards ready should someone ask, I don’t think you would have too hard of time getting guys to ask. <wink wink> You can try all at once in kind of a info cocktail. Maybe you can even do up a disguised YouTube infomercial that people don’t really know is a short infomercial until they get through watching it. Think outside-the-box, ways will come to you that you have not thought of. :-)

I would say the best thing to do is become recognized as an authority in your topic.

Hire a PR expert to get you featured in a few magazines. Reach out to authors who write about something similar and ask if you can be interviewed for the next edition. Give away awesome freebies (relevant stuff only please). Go on a once-per-week tour of colleges, associations, Meetup.com groups to promote a product or service and ALWAYS give out a card with your blog and a message that says “follow my blog for frequent updates on tips, strategies, and news”.

I’m surprised you have that many. Twitter is where it’s at. 140 characters or less means I don’t waste too much time reading stuff I don’t care about. I suggest tweeting with a “preview” of a blog post and using the last characters for shortened URL to the post.

Edit: also, include relevant hashtags. If you include trending topics just for views, you’ll be ignored and may even lose followers you had before for lack of direction.
And to get things started, you may do a giveaway. Just something cheap. Get your blog viewers to follow you, then get them to retweet a tweet by you to be eligible for a…say, $15 iTunes gift certificate code. They’ll remain your followers if you do it randomly so they have a chance to win. Plus, anyone that sees their retweet may follow you…especially if you make that a requirement to be eligible (so you can DM them the code).

Survey your readers to make sure your content is relevant. Otherwise, just collecting single hits puts you in the realm of a spammer. You want to retain readers, because they will drive others to your site.

1. Write interesting, useful, and original posts.
2. Write a lot of them.
3. Get other people to link to the posts they find to be the most interesting and useful.
4. Write some more interesting and useful posts so the people that click on your friends’ links stay to read more, come back later to read more, and link their friends to you.
5. Repeat from #1 as often as possible.

Who is your audience? Is it mostly people you know, like friends and family, or are you hoping to attract a much larger following? The first thing to do might be to figure out who is reading your stuff, figure out what they think is interesting, and write about it.

If what you’re writing is (by your standards but especially theirs) “very boring,” more of it doesn’t necessarily make it better. It has to be something that they want to read – which is usually going to be something informative, or amusing, or something they can identify with. Something they can’t get elsewhere and something worth reading – like a reward for tuning in.